Slidell, Louisiana to Gulfport, Mississippi

April 30, 2007

Katrina's Fury on Display

Slidell, Louisiana lies on the Northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain, at its junction with the Gulf of Mexico. The city was extensively flooded by Katrina. By the time we arrived, it was looking like good progress had been made toward cleaning up and repairing. When passing through some residential neighborhoods, there were uninhabited homes. A closer inspection of some of the homes revealed water lines halfway up the walls, inside and out. There were homes with FEMA Trailers in the front yard. Not many people were around.

FEMA Trailer in the front yard of a damaged home in Slidell, Louisiana.

In the yards of many homes were these curious little mounds. I never did see what lived inside nor was I sure I wanted to do so. There are no shortage of critters in this part of the world and I was happy to have kept my distance from most of them during this tour.

Later on, I learned these are made by Crayfish (or Crawfish, in local parlance).

We saw these curious sights on our way out of town. Our exit was via Voters Road, some residential streets, and eventually using US-190 which led us back to US-90. One such residential street was called Kingspoint Boulevard. To leave the neighborhood, we got on a levee with a dirt trail on top. It didn't look like much protection for the houses just a few feet below. I'm not sure how well it protected them during Katrina but we didn't see much damage.

We rode on this dirt path, on top of a levee, in the Kingspoint Subdivision of Slidell, Louisiana.

The combination of US-190 and US-90, still referred to as Chef Highway, were good roads. We did see evidence of the storm in the roadside brush which was strewn with all manner of litter and debris. There remained quite a bit of clean-up left to do. Chef Highway eventually led us over the Pearl River on a bridge that opened via a rotating center pivot. Upon crossing it, we had left Louisiana and were welcomed into Mississippi.

The border community was named Pearlington but it wasn't very big and upon passing through its eastern boundary, we entered the community of Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. We turned off US-90, onto Lower Bay Road, and then took the hypotenuse, which was called Old Lower Bay Road (OLBR). In the best of times, OLBR was a rough country road but in that time after Katrina, it was still strewn with debris and covered with thick sand in some spots, so we picked our way through, carefully.

A little further along, we rejoined Lower Bay Road, where the storm damage was becoming more evident. At one spot, the water had lifted an old church building off its foundation, floated it several hundred feet, and completely across the road!

The stones in the foreground were where the church building sat before the water floated it away.

The church floated across the road from where it had been before the hurricane.

A message written on the side of the church building to inform that restoration was planned.

We came upon an area with very nice homes, most of which seemed to have been abandoned. At one peaceful spot, we paused for a break under a spreading Live Oak Tree. There was nobody around the area that had once been a nice neighborhood before it had temporarily become part of the Gulf of Mexico.

What appeared to have once been a nice home was now uninhabited, in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi.

If there was a place that could have laid claim to having taken the biggest punch from Katrina, it was Waveland, Mississippi. What was once a small and pleasant beach community had been wiped-out by the storm. As fate would have it, Stan and I passed right through what was left of the town. I'll let the photos tell the story below. All we could say to each other, as we rode through was, "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

Nothing left on this street in Waveland, Mississippi.

Another mostly destroyed neighborhood in Waveland, Mississippi.

More devastation in Waveland, Mississippi.

The shoreline was damaged also in Waveland, Mississippi.

We rode on the beachfront bike path when leaving Waveland, Mississippi.

As we rode out of Waveland, we thought it strange that the good-sized road we were on had so little traffic. Every so often, some signs of life were apparent at an adjacent property but there was mostly a lot of quiet and the sounds of a light wind, leaves rustling, and the waters of the Gulf. We reached the town proper of Bay Saint Louis, which also seemed lightly inhabited, especially so at this time of year when the beach season should have been beginning. It was then we realized the US-90 Bridge across the Bay of Saint Louis was out of service. The storm had damaged the bridge so that no traffic was permitted to cross. We had to wait about an hour for a ferry to Pass Christian, pronounced Pahs Kris-tee-ahn. Love that little bit of French culture around this area. It was actually a nice break and we got to see the area from the perspective of the bay.

On the other side, everyone exited the ferry and once all the cars passed us, we had Highway 90 all to ourselves again. The solitude remained all the way to Gulfport, our destination for the evening. There, activity was concentrated around the casino but back off the beach a block or two, there were damaged homes and fewer signs of life. We settled in for the evening. It had been quite a day. Seeing all that destruction had put us into a more subdued frame of mind as we held our own informal debriefing at our hotel and with a poolside beer.

Today's ride: 53 miles (85 km)
Total: 172 miles (277 km)

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